Here at Popdose we’ve already debated whether the familiarity of “Born This Way” is the result of unconscious plagiarism or intentional homage; for me the only clue necessary was Gaga’s Grammy ponytail, a hair extension that may as well have been snatched from the propmaster for Madonna’s 1990 “Blonde Ambition” tour. But lost amid the concern over the songs’ similarities is the thematic evolution the new single represents – a pop-paradigm shift with implications much more profound than one singer wresting the dance-diva tiara from another’s aging head.

“Express Yourself,” like Madonna’s other ’89-’90 smashes “Like a Prayer,” “Vogue” and “Justify My Love,” was constructed to be a pop-culture event as much as it was a pop single. The songs themselves were designed to hit a variety of hot buttons that would advance Madonna’s reputation as a provocateur – religiosity, female empowerment, a fashion-fueled dance craze, unrepentant lust – while their videos pushed the envelope even further, into the realms of race, blasphemy, S&M, gay iconography, and … well … unrepentant lust. Still, in each case the aural and visual imagery was non-specific enough that the songs and videos could communicate separate messages to the distinct audiences she was targeting. A mainstream listener could titter at the exposed skin of “Justify My Love” or try out the dance moves in “Vogue” without worrying too much about the symbolism Madonna was imparting to the gay and kinky-sex subcultures whose ambitions fed her artistic choices, and vice versa. With a series of media-saturating moments, Madonna helped bring those subcultures closer to the mainstream – with long-term effects that are undeniable today.

“Born This Way,” on the other hand, drags the mainstream toward the subculture – and does so with a message so specific that its cultural impact reflects Madonna’s only in a funhouse-mirror kind of way. Gaga, unbound by the 20th-century conventions that (barely) corseted Madonna and freed by two decades of social and intellectual advancement, has created a hit that speaks directly to her gay devotees, while simultaneously challenging the pop masses to acknowledge, accept and even celebrate that gay subset of her audience. Indeed, she’s demanding that those masses accept a premise that remains the topic of significant culture-war debate – that homosexuality is predetermined by genetics, and not some sort of deviant “lifestyle choice.”

To look at it another way, a quarter-century ago Madonna found a way to position herself as a mainstream artist who drew inspiration from feminist, gay and other subcultures, in the process incorporating their themes into her own persona with a subtlety that said, “I want you with me.” Gaga’s contemporary message to her subculture base in “Born This Way,” on the other hand, couldn’t be more explicit: “I’m one of you.”

Of course, Gaga has been heading in this direction ever since her career went supernova in 2009. While her videos for “Paparazzi,” “Telephone,” “Bad Romance” and “Alejandro” have certainly been button-pushers, the real revelation came when mainstream fans snapped up tickets for last year’s “Monster Ball” tour, then discovered they had stumbled into an event that was equal parts pop concert and celebration of various misfit subcultures. Yes, there were plenty of out-and-proud gay men, many of them attempting to dress more flamboyantly than Gaga herself. Yet one couldn’t help but sense that Gaga’s shows were a magnet for the disaffected, the depressed, the closeted, and others (both gay and straight) who had come there looking for a place where they belonged, in a way they don’t in their everyday lives. They responded emotionally to Gaga’s frequent declarations of love for and identification with her “little monsters,” and to her exhortations for them to let their freak flags fly. In a sense, “Born This Way” is merely Gaga’s most unambiguous digital statement of the theme that has come to define her in the popular imagination.

What’s extraordinary to me, as Gaga claims her cultural moment, is that it’s taken her this long to make a record that so thoroughly embodies her ethos – and that, in the meantime, so many other pop divas have grabbed her mantle and forged huge hits over the past year. Pop radio these days is like the self-help section at Barnes & Noble, replete with Misfit-Empowerment anthems sung by the reigning queens of the charts directly to their audiences.

There is P!nk’s late-autumn smash “Raise Your Glass,” which is perhaps most blatant in its appeal to Gaga’s audience – “So raise your glass if you are wrong in all the right ways / All my underdogs / We will never be anything but loud and nitty gritty / Dirty little freaks…” – yet which serves nicely as an outward extension of the I’m-a-weirdo meme P!nk established as far back as 2002’s “Don’t Let Me Get Me.” (Her follow-up single, “F**kin’ Perfect,” operates in a very similar way.) And there’s Katy Perry’s Christmastime #1 “Firework,” a sincere paean to self-esteem that stands in stark contrast to her usual aren’t-I-naughty? shtick, and whose message is like to resonate long after she’s finished melting our collective popsicle.

And then there’s the curious case of Ke$ha, who “has been a cultural icon for weeks,” according to no less an authority than Brittney on Glee. Her ubiquitous singles of the past year – “Tik Tok” and “We R Who We R” – position her as the leader of a rambunctious gang of “woo girls” (to borrow a phrase from another TV comedy, How I Met Your Mother) who think the world of themselves, but who are clearly more than a little bit … off. (Personally, I adore the latter song’s rapid shift from the self-love of “You know we’re superstars” to the shrugging resignation of “We r who we r.”) On one level she’s singing straight-up party anthems, but the subtext that sits barely beneath the surface is, “Get it while you can, girls, because sooner or later we’re gonna have to sober up.” And that marks Ke$ha (or “Keh-Dollar Sign-Hah,” as Principal Figgins calls her) as a goofball worth following to see if she can lead her woo girls to the promised land of adulthood.

Speaking of Glee … the show is, of course, the televised exemplar of Misfit Empowerment, from the generalized struggles of the outcast (and frequently Slushie’d) choir geeks to Kurt’s specific troubles as a bullied gay teen who’s just starting to learn that It Gets Better. Say what you want about the show, but there’s no denying its cultural impact, particularly on the kids on both sides of the conformist/misfit divide who need it most. And while you’re at it, say what you will about the rendition of “Don’t Stop Believin’” that launched Glee from curiosity to phenomenon – but the 30-year-old song managed to perfectly encapsulate the premise of a show that couldn’t be more of its own moment. And while the track’s popularity helped Misfit Empowerment become the dominant pop-music theme of the day, it also proved that the theme is hardly a new one.

Indeed, it’s been around forever — from “In My Room” to “You Don’t Have to Be a Star” to “Livin’ on a Prayer” to “American Idiot” to “Tramps like us, baby we were born to run.” (C’mon, Bruce fans! Even the Boss would admit that the gulf between your fist-pumping sing-alongs and a Gaga crowd is no wider than Thunder Road, even if at this point your disaffection is more a distant memory than an immediate concern.)

What does seem new, however, is the prevalence of these anthems among the catalogs of today’s biggest female singers. The most popular divas of the previous two decades – Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, etc. – were monuments to self-aggrandizement whose songs, when they weren’t all about “learning to love yourself” (“The Greatest Love of All”), were frequently of the “look-how-great-I-am-because-of-you” variety (“Because You Loved Me,” “I Will Always Love You,” Bette Midler’s “Wind Beneath My Wings”). Heck, even the melisma-tron Mariah’s “Hero,” while claiming “that hero lies in you,” practically screamed, “No, it’s in me! Love me! Identify with ME!”

Something happened around the turn of the century, however, that put a damper on such diva conceits. Perhaps it was 9/11 and an attendant turn toward communitarianism; perhaps it was the slow, steady skankification of Whitney and Mariah through the ’90s (and Celine’s Vegas-ication during the early aughts) that made their self-worship less credible. Perhaps it’s an offshoot of our culture’s general repudiation of “elites” of all stripes – or perhaps it’s just that the fragmenting of the music industry, combined with the glut of instant pop stars engendered by American Idol and its imitators, has leveled the playing field (and diluted the talent pool) to the point where no one has the stature to pound her chest while insisting “My Heart Will Go On.”

Idol, with its increasingly terrible finale anthems, has flailed for years against the tide that drowned the divas. (To be fair, however, it must be noted that the best self-empowerment single of the decade, “Breakaway,” came from Idol alum Kelly Clarkson.) In a new pop landscape where Glee can have Lea Michele appropriate “Firework” for her own purposes even before Perry’s version has begun its chart descent, it will be interesting to see whether the new crop of female Idolettes might finally begin to define themselves less by offering clichéd imitations of Whitney and Mariah, and more by singing songs that speak directly to the insecurities and vulnerabilities of the Idol audience – or at least to the misfit subsections of it.

Then again, the more relevant questions may be, How soon will Kurt perform “Born This Way” on Glee? And, How will he look inside an egg-shaped bubble?

However it happens, pop history is littered with acts who’ve been abandoned by legions of formerly devoted followers. (There’s a reason why the used-CD stores are crammed with Garth Brooks and Backstreet Boys albums.) But that last scenario is rarely pulled off successfully – and the latest singer to (probably) ride a desperate stab at maturity straight to the cutout bins is poor, not-a-girl-not-yet-Britney-Spears-but definitely-not-Hannah-Montana Miley Cyrus. Between those incestalicious photos with Billy Ray in Vanity Fair, that pole dance at the Teen Choice Awards, the underwear-free excursion captured by paparazzi, and the bizarro video for the recent semi-hit “Can’t Be Tamed,” Miley’s recent behavior has some parents wondering whether it’s time to bring the lights up on her Party in the USA.

I couldn’t care less about that stuff – I’m eagerly counting the days til Selena Gomez decides to tart things up — but the negative buildup around Miley has proven too much for my daughter Catie. Some of you may recall the hijinks that ensued when I engaged Catie and her BFF Bridget to talk about Why Hannah Montana (Was) So Awesome! about a year and a half ago. The girls were 7 then, and they knew what they liked … but they’re almost 9 now, and something about Miley’s new grown-up persona has definitely rubbed them the wrong way.

Jon: So how’s it going, girls?
Bridget: How ya doin? Is life smooth sailin’, or bumpaaaaaaay?
Catie: Don’t be an idiot.
Bridget: I’m just doing my thing.

Jon: The three of us were right here a while back, talking about Miley and why you liked her so much.
Bridget: That was so awesome.
Catie: I think we were really funny, but we said a bunch of good stuff about Miley that we shouldn’t have.
Bridget: Now she’s, like, blecccccchhhhh.
Jon: I’m sure she’d be sorry to know you feel that way.
Catie: What if she reads this?
Bridget: Of course she’ll read it.
Catie: Well, it’s too bad for her. We know all this stuff about her now, and she shouldn’t be trying to keep it a secret, because we already know.

Jon: Wait a minute – if she’s trying to keep stuff a secret, then where do you hear about it?
Bridget: I just know things.
Catie: Yeah, right…
Bridget: No, really. We read about her in magazines.
Jon: Which magazines?
Catie: You know, US, Bop…

Jon: I’m so glad to know a couple of 8-year-olds are getting your information from US magazine. Remind me to talk to your mothers about that. Anyway, what’s so bad about Miley now?
Catie: Well, number one, she hates Glee, the best show ever.
Jon: Is that really true? Because if I remember correctly, when you first brought it up you were complaining that she just said she doesn’t “get” musicals in general, not that she hates Glee.
Catie: Well, the thing is, in the magazine it said, “Things Miley Hates,” with a really gross picture like this. (she makes a face that is, in fact, pretty gross) And it said, “Glee.”
Jon: And how does US magazine, or Tiger Beat or whichever one it was, know all this stuff? Did they quote her?
Catie: I don’t think so. They just know.
Bridget: That’s right. Well, maybe they don’t know. We don’t know, for sure, but we still hate her.

Jon: Well, it’s good to know you believe everything you read. So, why else don’t you like Miley anymore?
Catie: She has tattoos on her boobies.
Bridget: Yeah, who does that?
Catie: One says “Destiny.” (editor’s note: apparently this is not true)
Bridget: One says “Just Breathe.”
Catie: And “Believe.” (editor’s note: nope … though she apparently does have the word “love” tattooed near her ear)

Jon: Hmmm. The one that says “Just Breathe” – do you think that’s on her chest to remind her lungs what to do?
Bridget: Don’t be stupid.
Catie: No, it’s in memory of her friend that died.
Bridget: What?
Catie: That’s what it said in the magazine. (editor’s note: in fact, “Just Breathe” is the slogan for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, a cause dear to — if not tattooed near to — Popdose’s collective heart)
Bridget: What magazine?
Catie: Bop, or something.

Jon: OK, let’s move on.
Catie: Well, according to Tiger Beat magazine, she’s apparently dating Justin Bieber.
Jon: I doubt that. She’s about four years older than Justin.
Bridget: Then she’s dating more than one person. She cheats on people! She’s also dating some guy named Liam who she made a movie with, and they had a kiss, and then it was like, “Let’s get married.”
Catie: Yeah, and she’s supposedly gonna marry Justin Bieber, too. (editor’s note: that would be news to both Miley and Justin, though they did have dinner together once — and she did date a dude named Justin Gaston a couple years ago)
Bridget: Yeah, so she’ll be married to a bunch of people.

Jon: You guys don’t like Justin Bieber much, either.
Catie: He has a horrible voice.
Bridget: We should do an interview about Justin Bieber next. I could go on all day saying what I don’t like about Justin Bieber.
Jon: Well, how many songs of his do you actually know?
Catie: “Baby,” and …
Bridget: Yeah … “Baby” … and …
Catie: Some are on Radio Disney, and we have no idea who it is so we listen to it for a while, and then we give up trying to figure out who it is, and hit the button that tells you, and it’s Justin Bieber so we turn it off.

Jon: Back to Miley: I see you girls have made out lists of all the things you don’t like about her.
Bridget: We couldn’t remember them all, so we made lists because we had nothing better to do.
Jon: I see. Bridget, what’s that on your page about … monkeys?
Bridget: She took a real monkey cage, then took all the monkeys out –
Catie: — and put herself in it, and sat down in this huge nest, and came out of it and she had wings! It was so dumb.
Jon: This is the “Can’t Be Tamed” video we’re talking about, right? How do you know there had been monkeys in that cage?
Bridget: I know things, OK?
Catie: That’s what you said last time!
Bridget: I’m in GATE (Gifted and Talented Education)!
Catie: Nice!

Jon: Yeah, whatever. OK, so what else is wrong with Miley?
Bridget: Her clothes are so 10 minutes ago!
Jon: And who are you to judge pop-star fashion?
Bridget: Because Catie said so.
Catie: Yeah, because I said so. It’s right here on my list. Like, one time she was wearing this outfit and it was clear, and she was just wearing a bra and no underwear. Oh, and she thinks she’s Lady Gaga.
Bridget: Yeah, she moves her boobs around!
Catie: She should be in jail with Paris Hilton.

Bridget: Yeah. And one more thing –
Catie: Her show’s for idiots!
Jon: You mean that show you watched pretty much nonstop for three years, right up until a couple months ago? Why did you do that?
Catie: ’Cause she was good then.
Jon: So what happened?
Bridget: She hit, like, puberty two times.
Catie: All her songs are good, but her voice isn’t. We went on the internet and looked at a bunch of Miley concerts, and it was terrible.
Jon: Well, it’s a good thing we spent so much money so you could go to one of those concerts last year.
Catie: How much was it?

Jon: Never mind. But here’s the thing: If you guys liked Miley for years, and were so loyal to her, but now you think she’s awful, doesn’t that make you wonder about your own taste in music and TV shows?
Bridget: No.
Catie: Yes.
Bridget: Kind of.
Catie: It makes me feel like I was dumb when I was little.
Bridget: I was awesome!
Catie: Yeah, I was awesome, but I was dumb, because I liked bad music.

Jon: So what do you like now?
Bridget: Lady Gaga.
Catie: Taylor Swift rocks the most.
Bridget: Bleaah, Taylor Swift. (sticks her finger down her throat) Lady Gaga is better.
Jon: Do you think you’ll feel the same way about Taylor or Lady Gaga in a couple years as you do about Miley now?
Catie: Taylor Swift is never going to lose her career, because she’s awesome.
Bridget: I don’t know. I don’t really care.

Catie: Daddy, do you think Miley will read this?
Jon: What do you think she’d say if she did read this stuff you’re saying about her?
Bridget: “I know, I know.”
Catie: “I should quit.”
Jon: That’s kind of harsh. The last time we did one of these interviews, you were pretty sure she was going to be on Disney Channel until she was 85. Now what do you think is going to happen to her?
Bridget: She should go find those monkeys and put them back in their cage.
Catie: She’s going to be a zookeeper, and she has to pick up monkey poop.

(Bridget falls over laughing)

Catie: Do you want to go watch some Taylor Swift videos on YouTube?
Bridget: No, I hate her! Let’s watch “Bad Romance” again.
Jon: All right, girls. Thanks for talking. Don’t be a stranger. Now get out!
Bridget: Bye-bye, Popdose!

The Journey classic provided Glee’s seminal moment, and it served, fittingly, as an enthusiasm-goosing opener for the cast’s concert of favorite tunes from the series. (The band apparently has a future on the show as well: “Faithfully” will be performed during the season finale next week, and the Glee kids tore through a mashup of “Any Way You Want It” and “Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’” near the end of Saturday’s performance.) Following its out-of-the-gate high point, “Glee Live” settled into a rather predictable selection of show highlights, bouncing from “My Life Would Suck Without You” to “Push It” to “Sweet Caroline” to “The Boy is Mine” to “The Lady is a Tramp” with little concern for genre barriers (or, in too many cases, the Wonder-bread quality of the arrangements and vocals – though at least there was no lip-syncing in evidence, except perhaps on the crazy-costumed tribute to Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”).

Throughout, the cast members performed their glorified karaoke while remaining in character – leading this jaded observer to wonder, more than once, how tens of thousands of fans could have been hoodwinked into attending Brady Kids concerts back in the 1970s. (Have there been other instances when a TV-series cast toured in character? I can’t think of one — apart from the Monkees, sorta.) As much of an in-the-moment blast as it is for a Glee fan to watch Rachel and Finn and Puck and Quinn and Mercedes and Kurt perform onstage, the euphoria was tempered by the nagging sense that there’s not much difference between watching wheelchair-bound Artie (played by the not-paralyzed-in-real-life Kevin McHale) spin around to his god-awful version of “Dancing With Myself,” and a kid of the ’70s watching Christopher Knight-as-Peter Brady sing that paean to adolescent vocal cords, “Time to Change.” With their occasional video-screen commentaries, adult Glee stars Matthew Morrison and Jane Lynch even seemed like a latter-day Mike and Carol coupling … well, perhaps with Sue Sylvester as the anti-Carol.

Clearly “Glee Live,” like those old Brady Kids concerts, is not a gig you’d want to wander into without an established affection for the series – except for the opportunity it offers to witness the brilliance of Lea Michele. Already a Drama Desk-nominated Broadway actress (Les Miserables, Spring Awakening) before she took on the role of Rachel Berry – and currently one of the world’s 100 Most Influential People, according to Time – Michele is by far the most seasoned stage performer of the Glee actor/singers, not to mention the most talented (by a long shot). So it’s no surprise that she dominated the proceedings Saturday night, and provided both of the concert’s emotional peaks with her renditions of the Funny Girl chestnut “Don’t Rain on My Parade” and the glorious “Defying Gravity,” from Wicked.

She sang the latter song as a duet with the otherwise-underused Chris Colfer (Kurt), and its impact onstage was easily as poignant as its use on the series. (Fun fact for Glee fans: Colfer’s real-life high school banned him from performing “Defying Gravity” in a talent show because it’s usually sung by girls.) Their joint effort moved Michele to (real) tears by the end of the song; whether she was overcome by the beauty of the performance, or overwhelmed by the impact the Glee experience has had on her own career, the emotion wasn’t difficult to understand. One thing’s for sure: Michele is a Streisand-level superstar in the making – if it’s possible to attain superstardom based solely on talent in this day and age. Sad as it is to say, she may need to become tabloid fodder if she wants to take it to the next level; hopefully she’s got Lindsay Lohan’s number on her speed dial.

Apart from Michele’s diva turns, the highlights of the wildly uneven (just like the series) “Glee Live” were ones you’d easily guess if you’re a regular viewer: Amber Riley’s (Mercedes) soulful renderings of “Beautiful” and “Bust Your Windows,” the mattress-trampoline set piece for Van Halen’s “Jump,” the vivacious performance of Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” by rival group Vocal Adrenaline (still reveling in the impropriety of the song choice), and the encore-closing “Somebody to Love.” All told, the concert builds upon Glee’s high-concept foundation (High School Musical meets Mamma Mia meets American Idol) — and the robust sales and rapturous receptions that so far have greeted this brief, four-city tour are likely to burnish even further the show’s stature as a cultural touchstone. It’s a ride we Gleeks had better enjoy while it lasts, because we’re all headed for a major guilt hangover sooner or later.

Par for the course, she says. “I don’t play live that often – I’m pretty much a studio rat,” she told me last week as she prepared to abandon the Palm Springs, CA, home where she spends the other half of the year. (“God, don’t call it ‘wintering,’ though I guess that’s what it has become the last few years,” she commands. Sorry, Kelley.) “I’m a songwriter, not a performer – that’s what I consider myself. I sing and play and record all as a means of writing a song and getting it heard. If I could have written a song and had Emmylou Harris sing it, that would have been great, but I’ve had to do it myself.

“I made records under the name astroPuppees” – four of them, between 1996 and 2005 – “because I was more interested in the songs, and not so much in me personally, or trying to make a name for myself. The first astroPuppees record (You Win the Bride) was almost entirely me, but when I got signed to Hightone Records they said, ‘You have to get a band together and tour.’ So I did that, and we would do a nice, punky thing live, but as time has gone on it’s circled back around to where my shows are sort of calmer and more organic.

“I’ve always felt slightly weird about playing live, because I couldn’t shake the idea that the people would all rather be home watching TV – and a lot of the time I would, too. Though I have come to enjoy it more, especially lately, because when I play a gig with Marti and Don it’s like finding myself back in the womb. It’s so warm and comfortable.”

If that extended quote seems a bit scattershot … well, there’s an interview with Kelley Ryan for you. After five minutes of gossiping about Jones and Dixon, and five more of talking about Ireland, Facebook, and the internet in general, Ryan said, “Wow, maybe we should talk about music for a while!” I believe I got as far as, “Sure – what do you want to talk about?”, before Ryan launched into a rambling, though utterly charming, monologue that covered everything from the astroPuppees catalog to recording with Dixon and Jones to how she met her husband, music publisher Dan Bourgoise. “Hope I didn’t go on too long there,” she concluded, finally. “Did you have some questions?”

An hour spent with a Kelley Ryan album – no matter what name she’s recording under – is, happily, as much fun as an hour spent listening to her talk. For her new CD, she started out by writing a couple of songs from decidedly different, but distinctly female, perspectives – and at that point she decided to write the whole album that way. The result is the most … well … girlish collection of music I’ve heard in years, perhaps since Deana Carter’s country albums of a decade ago. (That’s a high compliment, by the way.) Ryan says she had to overcome the rough-and-tumble stance that even female rockers frequently employ in order to achieve Twist’s thematic tilt.

“I’d been hanging with Marti,” she adds, “and she had been painting all her ‘Edies’” – a series of portraits of Edith Beale, of Gray Gardens renown. “She was painting women, and I was seeing her strength as a painter — not trying to start out from ‘I was a rock star,’ but being fearless enough to let the paintings stand on their own. I have always been a little bit cautious when I was writing — I’d have that bad angel on my shoulder, telling me, ‘You can’t write about that!’ But watching Marti empowered me, and helped me realize that I didn’t have to edit myself.

“I said to somebody while doing press for this album, ‘I didn’t do this the rock-’n’-roll-boy way,’ and everybody who’s written about the album picked that up. But it’s more about how all of us have feminine and masculine sides and this time I just wanted to explore my feminine side. I thought, ‘write what you know.’ And I’m a girl.”

Twist plays like a song cycle in reverse as it depicts the broad range of female experience, beginning with a profile of an elderly Irish woman tipping into dementia (“Bridie’s Eyes”) and concluding with an ode to “The Beautiful Child.” Both those songs feature exquisite string arrangements by Van Dyke Parks, whose contributions brought a new sense of maturity and gravitas to Ryan’s sunny melodic palette.

“I gave him demos with a vocal and a guitar, and he put the strings on, and that set the focus for the album going a certain way,” Ryan says. “I would go into my studio in the morning and turn on his strings, and it was like living in a Van Dyke cartoon!”

Elsewhere, the songs variously venture into nursery rhyme (the delightful “Monkey with a Flashlight”), girl-group harmonies (“Bleeding a Girl”), and singer-songwriter intimacy (“Heart and Bone,” the first song written for the CD). Jones provides both duet vocals and harmonies. Toward the end of the album, Ryan even re-contextualizes Beck’s ballad “Lost Cause” (from Sea Change), having been inspired by the song while grieving for a friend who had committed suicide.

Ryan credits Dixon, who produced the album over a two-year period after contributing sporadically to the astroPuppees oeuvre, with helping to shape her thoughts about the songs she had been writing – and with helping her pull away from the “band” concept.

“This record started out to be an astroPuppees album,” she says, “but as it was coming out it was so personal, so different thematically from what I’d done before, and Dixon told me, ‘I think this is a Kelley Ryan record.’ We had decided to do the whole album together from the get-go, and so he did all the bass, Marti did all the background vocals, and Jim Brock (a Dixon compatriot from North Carolina) played all the drums. The funny thing is that when I was recording as astroPuppees it was mostly just me — but when I decided to record as Kelley Ryan it became much more of a band thing than I’ve ever had.

“I’ve never been so happy with the process of recording, and then promoting an album. Every single element has been creatively satisfying, and a lot of it is because of working so closely with Don and Marti the whole way through. I’ve waited my whole life for an artistic experience like this one, but now I feel validated. Now I have to go rest for a while, and do some reading — and then I want to come right back and do another one.”

A leading exponent of the latter view is Village Voice/rollingstone.com/Spin/Blender contributor Christopher R. Weingarten, who last week delivered his second annual profane rant about the bleak future of music criticism to the 140 Characters Conference in New York. As you might imagine, the conference is a Twitter-centric event — and Weingarten, apart from his recent pair of tirades, is most famous for reviewing 1,000 albums on Twitter last year. Here’s the video of his head-exploding performance last Tuesday:

Now, let’s leave aside the irony of a man who chose Twitter as his forum for a thousand-review stunt — why not Haiku? — railing against the inanity of contemporary rock-crit egalitarianism. Let’s just deal with the substance. Having myself served as a half-decently paid music and arts journalist in the mainstream media, I can sympathize with the core of Weingarten’s problem: that, in the internet era, music journalism has become simultaneously a less lucrative and more democratized “profession,” while the sheer volume of both new music and new-music coverage has become overwhelming. (The same is true, to a greater or lesser degree, for film, theater, dance and visual-art criticism.) That said, he points his upturned middle fingers in all the wrong directions — at the expanding numbers of writers and alternative outlets for criticism, at the marketing tricks of indie labels and unsigned acts, at the eyeball-catching strategies of the music blogs, and at the popularity of “aggregating” software in our list-happy, statistics-driven media universe.

Weingarten’s real issues are with cultural changes he can’t control, because they’re related to technology and public taste: the new ease of recording and releasing music, and the internet platform that has offered thousands of writers the ability to skirt traditional media gatekeepers and get ourselves heard, even if we don’t get paid for it (enough, or at all). He’s railing against the end of the era when a few prominent gatekeepers at music magazines and major newspapers paid a small number of writers a (sometimes) decent sum of money to produce (hopefully) intelligent criticism that was influential in part because there simply wasn’t that much of it. He’s also railing against a music business that has expanded from a couple dozen respected label gatekeepers to hundreds of indies with hard-to-gauge cred (not to mention artists marketing their own work through MySpace, eMusic, CDBaby and other websites).

It used to be that just a couple hundred releases a year had any hope of gaining traction in the marketplace; nowadays, thousands of artists with new releases are begging for recognition from whomever might offer a review or accept an exclusive MP3 or video embed. Weingarten suggests that “indie labels need to recognize they have the power in [their] relationship [with blogs]” — really, Chris? Maybe that was true 15 years ago, when there were fewer indies with any credibility, but now there’s a Tower of Babble of labels and independent artists. They’re marketing, often on a shoestring, music that is cheaper to record and easier to release than it once was — yet simultaneously much more difficult to earn money from. And they’re desperate for some scrap of media coverage that might result in a dime going into their pockets. Sure, the bloggers are desperate for more attention, too — who wants to answer the question “What if they launched a website and nobody came?” Still, only a handful of oft-visited blogs are getting the high-profile MP3 or video exclusives that Weingarten criticizes – and besides, what’s the difference between this new strategy and those flexidiscs that used to be stapled into copies of the totally legit Trouser Press, or the cover-art choices that Rolling Stone‘s editors have always made with an eye toward selling the most copies on the newsstand?

Weingarten says this new structure of internet gatekeepers is ruining rock criticism, creating a new heirarchy of hype via aggregating sites and encouraging fan-based writing that he views (not always incorrectly) as less-informed and inferior to the critical titans of the past. He even whines that web-based critics rarely write negative reviews! It’s not an unreasonable complaint — some great critics have built their legacies as much on their hostility toward the bad as their rapture for the good, and Weingarten clearly enjoys a good f-bomb-laced gripe-fest. But when a blogger is getting paid little to nothing to indulge her passion for music, why should she bother to flame a mediocre release when she can just ignore it instead? (Unless there’s a vendetta involved, which often makes for fun reading.) In the new world of democratized criticism, inattention — not negative attention — is frequently the unkindest cut.

Still, the real root of Weingarten’s ranting is that his own chosen gatekeepers — a few major music magazines that decided which releases would be reviewed for the masses, and a few prominent indie labels that could be counted on to put out the supposed best and most innovative music — have seen their monopolies buried under an avalanche of product and writing.

We live in an era when music journalism has become less a career choice than a hobby, for all but the luckiest few — partly because nowadays those who aren’t the luckiest (or necessarily the most talented) few don’t have to give up their desire to write and be read just because the Village Voice or rollingstone.com don’t want to pay them a buck a word. One hopes that readers can continue to discern the difference between great pop-music writing, whether it’s by Joe Levy or Ann Powers or one of us Popdose schmucks, and lousy criticism. But that doesn’t mean it’s an illegitimate form of gatekeeping if 50 joe-schmoe music bloggers, aggregated on the Hype Machine, are all jizzing over the same new band’s MySpace page. After all, as I believe an Elvis album cover once noted, four dozen guys in bathrobes can’t be wrong.

At the end of his tirade, Weingarten suggests that his listeners go peruse a magazine they don’t usually read, or go listen to a radio station outside their usual demographic, instead of checking for the most-blogged new act on Hype Machine. What he’s really doing is asking us to patronize his preferred gatekeepers — the traditional makers of musical taste — rather than the ones to which the music-consuming public more and more is turning its attention. His beef with the plethora of writers hoping to get our voices heard on the internet is sadly misplaced, not only because there are plenty of skilled, insightful and passionate critics out here, but because a lot of them are calling attention to worthy music and artists who can’t break through at the traditional media.

In short, Chris, if you’ll climb down off your high horse you’ll recognize that your problem isn’t with writers, but with the internet-fueled shift toward democratized reading and listening habits that have destroyed the monopoly of old-line gatekeepers. If Rolling Stone and radio were providing a product that was riveting enough to keep people away from Stereogum or Idolator or Popdose, you wouldn’t have anything to complain about — and your freelance paychecks would probably be bigger. And isn’t that the true source of your dyspepsia?

Fortunately, I’ve got the artist kicking off our countdown to push me forward, and remind me why I took up this six-part (so far) endeavor in the first place. As always, I’ll conclude with a list of some other #2s from the decade.

11. “Work It,” Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott. I don’t particularly care for this track, but there are a couple reasons why it’s a perfect launching pad for this column. For one, it represents a key step in the evolution of hip-hop toward raunchy themes and racy lyrics. Because Missy was as nasty as the boyz of her era, she absolved the trend of any misogynist stigma, and it was a quick step from “Work It” to the strip-club hip-hop soul that’s become so prevalent lately. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, necessarily … though when even Jordin Sparks is singing about “the club,” maybe the moment is over, huh? Anyway, the other key accomplishment of “Work It” was its 10-week stay at #2 — tied with Foreigner’s “Waiting for a Girl Like You” (which we celebrated here) for the longest runner-up run in chart history. And here’s where we’ve gotta give Missy her props, because she’s got the stones to admit that only reaching #2 with her biggest hit kinda sucked. “I just wanted to die those ten weeks,” she said of being blocked by Eminem’s smash “Lose Yourself” through the winter of ’03. “I mean, it wasn’t cool.”

10. (tie) “Apologize,” Timbaland with OneRepublic ; “This Ain’t a Scene, It’s an Arms Race,” Fall Out Boy; “The Reason,” Hoobastank; “In the End,” Linkin Park; “Hanging by a Moment,” Lifehouse; “Photograph,” Nickelback. Here, in descending order of quality (as far as I’m concerned), are six of the seven biggest rock-based hits to cross over to the pop chart this decade without making it all the way to the top. So why have I lumped all these songs together here? Well, considering that you can count the #1 hits that have emerged from the rock idiom since 2002 on the fingers on one hand – depending on how you feel about the crunchy guitars on your standard Kelly Clarkson or Pink single – it just makes sense to confine these singles to their own little ghetto. So, take a quick peek over the wall and then move on … there’s nothing much to see here. (Except to wonder why Timbaland makes himself look so ridiculous in the following video — as if his oversold “hey, heys” from the control room were actually being caught by the mics in the studio.)

9. “Pon de Replay,” Rihanna. The Barbadian spitfire’s first big hit was the dancehall (and aerobics-studio) jam of summer ’05, though it became one of four songs left in the dust by Mariah Carey’s comeback smash “We Belong Together.” Interestingly, another of those four was Mariah’s own follow-up hit, “Shake It Off,” which became only the second single in history to be blocked by another track from the same artist. The first was “Twist and Shout,” which got stuck behind “Can’t Buy Me Love” during the initial wave of Beatlemania. At least the Fabs have an excuse for getting in their own way, as “Twist and Shout” was released on the Vee-Jay label – it was among the early-Beatles songs Capitol Records had rejected when it didn’t believe the group would be successful in the U.S. The phenomenon repeated itself once more in 2006 – sorta – when Gwen Stefani’s “The Sweet Escape,” featuring Akon, was blocked by Akon’s own “Don’t Matter.” As for “Pon de Replay,” it was the track from Rihanna’s initial four-song demo that grabbed the ear of then-Def Jam honcho Jay-Z, and the rest is history … including the unfortunate incident you’ll be thinking about while you read my #6 listing below.

8. (tie) “You Belong with Me,” Taylor Swift, and “Party in the USA,” Miley Cyrus. Look, I don’t care what you think – these smashes by America’s sweethearts are my daughter Catie’s favorite songs of the year, and I’ve had them drilled into my skull to the point where I can think of little else. Besides, they’re both nice little tunes, and they’ve both sparked nice little controversies. Everybody knows what happened to poor Taylor at the VMAs, and then there’s the small matter of Miley’s supposed “pole dancing” at the Teen Choice Awards. If you’re like me, you’ve never actually seen what the fuss was all about, so check out the fan video below (I couldn’t find an “official” video anywhere on the Net).

All I can say is, anybody who can get Bill O’Reilly to embarrass himself prattling on about teenagers and values, just because she did a couple of knee bends while standing atop an ice cream cart, is OK by me. So Catie, you can keep watching clips of your “girl songs” at full blast as long as you want; please, though, just wait a few more years before you discover this. (Fun facts: “You Belong with Me” and “Party in the USA” are two of four songs whose artists never quite got to toast “mazel tov” thanks to the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling”; the others were “Run This Town” by Jay-Z, Rihanna and Taylor’s tormentor, and “Watcha Say” by Jason DeRulo. All five songs continue to sit in Billboard’s Top 10. “I Gotta Feeling” is tied as the second-longest-running #1 hit in history; even more impressive, its 14-week run at the top immediately followed a 12-week run by the Peas’ “Boom Boom Pow,” giving them the longest stretch at #1 of any act in history.) Anyway, here’s the sweet-as-sugar video for “You Belong with Me,” the Best Female Video of the year. (Suck it, Kanye!)

7. “Complicated,” Avril Lavigne. It’s hard to believe Avril’s debut single didn’t top the Hot 100 – though it’s even harder to believe that its follow-up, “Sk8er Boi,” only made it to #10. “Complicated” was ubiquitous on at least a half-dozen radio formats during the summer of 2002, from Mainstream Top 40 to Hot Adult Contemporary, but crapped out at #2 on the big chart behind a track that dominated several other formats – Nelly’s “Hot in Herre.” Speaking of crapping, “Complicated” inspired one of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s best parodies in years, a song that was my son Jacob’s favorite for entirely too long a while. Al never made a video for it, but fortunately somebody else did … using Legos.

6. (tie) “Forever” and “With You,” Chris Brown. Like millions of other folks, I used to love Chris Brown’s music without a guilty conscience; now, like most of those same millions, I still love the music but feel all torn up about it. I feel especially awful about putting Brown ahead of Rihanna on this list … but, man, these tracks are just killer, aren’t they? “With You” bears too close a resemblance to Beyonce’s smash “Irreplaceable” – though Brown completely got away with it, in no small part because both songs were written and produced by the Stargate crew. Besides, how could anybody complain about hearing those acoustic guitars on two R&B hits in one year? (“With You” also has the distinction of being the only song featuring the word “boo” that I can bear to sit through.) Then there’s “Forever,” which started as a Doublemint gum jingle – a fact that completely escaped my TiVo-enhanced, commercial-free existence at the time, leaving me to wonder why he kept singing, “Double your pleasure, double your fun” — and ended up a YouTube phenomenon for reasons having nothing to do with Brown himself. If you haven’t seen the video in question – or the wedding episode of The Office – here’s your chance to get with the program. Before getting to Brown’s awesome original clip, it’s worth noting that after climbing into the number 2 slot behind Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl,” “Forever” was leapfrogged by … Rihanna’s “Disturbia.”

5. “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” Green Day. Back at #9 I listed six rock-based hits to peak in the runner-up slot during the decade. Well, here’s the seventh – though its chord progression more properly belongs in a treatise on rock hits of the ’90s, along with the rest of Oasis’ “Wonderwall.” That fact wasn’t lost on mash-up master Party Ben, who blended the two songs (along with Aerosmith’s “Dream On” and Travis’ “Writing to Reach You”) on “Boulevard of Broken Songs,” a centerpiece of his internet-only American Edit album. Beyond that, Green Day’s hit was easily the biggest of their career, and spent four months atop both Billboard’s Mainstream Rock and Modern Rock charts. (Unbelievably, “American Idiot” had peaked at a paltry #61 on the Hot 100.) “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” was named Record of the Year at the 2006 Grammys, in a vote that was widely considered a corrective measure for American Idiot failing to win Album of the Year the year before. The song’s video, meanwhile, cleaned up at the MTV awards in ’05, taking six moon men including Video of the Year. Suck it again, Kanye! (He was nominated for “Jesus Walks.”)

4. “Heartless,” Kanye West. Yeah, yeah, I know … You can trash Kanye’s arrogance and poor timing all you want, but you can’t deny the skillz. He samples the Alan Parsons Project here, for crying out loud! Like the next song featured in this column, “Heartless” has been covered to great effect by white acts a couple times already, in ways that don’t at all resemble Pat Boone-style abominations. Its video, with rotoscoped animation (and the Jetsons too!), is pretty kick-ass as well – though not good enough to score any nominations at this year’s MTV awards, much less any trophies. And the single got stuck at #2 last winter behind Beyonce’s “Single Ladies,” which went on to win Video of the Year. Suck it, Kanye!

3. “Crazy,” Gnarls Barkley. What makes me crazy is that this song didn’t reach #1. And what were the earth-shattering singles that blocked it from the top of the chart during the summer of ’06? Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous” (not terrible, but come on) and Fergie’s … fricking … “London Bridge.” (What’s “going down” is Western civilization.) Well, whatever – those two songs are pretty much forgotten already, while “Crazy” will live on in a million cover versions as well as the Gnarls’ already-classic original. (Of course, “original” is a relative term – the bassline is ripped off from a spaghetti-Western soundtrack tune called “Nel Cimitero di Tucson.” ) Seriously, though, has any song since “Yesterday” sparked the flood of covers that this song has? The Raconteurs, Paolo Nutini and the Twilight Singers have rocked it up; Ray LaMontagne, Shawn Colvin, Brandi Carlile and Furtado herself have slowed it down. Of Montreal, Mates of State and Butch Walker have put indie spins on it, and then there’s this guy with a theremin.

2. “Since U Been Gone,” Kelly Clarkson. Most of my Popdose colleagues rate “Crazy” above “Since U Been Gone” – I know this for a fact, and so will the rest of you in about a month – but, to me, Clarkson’s was the decade’s perfect pop single. (OK, not quite perfect – maybe she could have constrained the banshee wailing on the bridge – but still…) It spent nine months in the Top 40, five in the Top 10, but stalled at #2 in the spring of 2005 behind 50 Cent’s inane, sexed-up “Candy Shop” – which had already thrown up a roadblock for “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” a couple weeks earlier. Five years later, though, Clarkson and Green Day continue to ride high on the charts, while 50 Cent has pushed back the release of his new album at least half a dozen times. Suck it, Fiddy!

Once more, for argument’s sake, here are some other #2 hits of the decade, along with the songs that held them back from the pinnacle: “Breathe,” Faith Hill (Santana’s “Maria Maria”); “Survivor,” Destiny’s Child (Janet Jackson’s “All for You”); “Hit ’Em Up Style,” Blu Cantrell (Usher’s “U Remind Me”); “Without Me,” Eminem (Nelly’s “Hot in Herre”); “Beautiful,” Christina Aguilera (B2K & P Diddy’s “Bump, Bump, Bump”); “Flying Without Wings,” Ruben Studdard (Clay Aiken’s “This Is the Night”); “Right Thurr,” Chingy (Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love”); “Turn Me On,” Norah Jones (Outkast’s “Hey Ya”); “Don’t Cha,” Pussycat Dolls (Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together”); “Fergalicious,” Fergie (Beyonce’s “Irreplaceable”); “The Sweet Escape,” Gwen Stefani featuring Akon (Akon’s own “Don’t Matter”); and “Because of You,” Ne-Yo (Maroon 5’s “Makes Me Wonder”).

I’ll wrap up this series in a few weeks with a rundown of #2 hits from throughout the rock era that may as well have peaked at #99, for all we remember about them. Roy Head’s “Treat Her Right” or the Poppy Family’s “Which Way You Goin’ Billy,” anybody? Anybody?

Sometimes I wonder if kids today are bothered in the slightest by the sorts of things that used to freak me out when I was a boy. For example, when I was 9 I spent several months in what I now refer to as my “Hitler phase,” when – fueled by the Nazi-horror stories imparted by a creepy friend, and spooked by a coffee-table book called Sieg Heil! that I had checked out from the local library — I frequently conjured the very real image of Der Führer lurking behind my darkened bedroom door. (He didn’t have to hold a machete – the thought of that moustache alone was enough to make me wet myself.) Those months were probably the only time I was thankful to share a room with my older brother, because I couldn’t stand to be in the dark by myself. I often found myself running at a full sprint to the front of the house to escape Adolf’s clutches, and those were the days when my mom would stomp through the house, snapping off lights I had left on and muttering something about owning the electric company.

At about that same time, during the fall of 1975, my friend Kevin brought over a single he had snatched from his sister’s collection. We knew it simply as “The Exorcist,” but of course it was an edited version of the “first movement” (A/K/A side one) of Mike Oldfield’s debut LP Tubular Bells, excerpted for use as the theme to William Friedkin’s film version of William Peter Blatty’s religious-horror novel. The single, officially known as “Tubular Bells (Theme from The Exorcist),” had reached the Top 10 almost two years before, but its success had predated by just a few months my headlong leap into pop-radio obsession during the fall of ’74. And as a 9-year-old, I wasn’t yet familiar with the R-rated film.

I was, however, intimately familiar with the novel. I don’t know why my parents had allowed me to get my hands on Sieg Heil! or The Exorcist or Jaws (which I devoured that fall even as the film continued its 8-month-long run in a local theater) – maybe everything was fair game for a pair of atheist liberals in the post-Watergate era. Suffice it to say that my first real exposure to Catholicism (apart from a couple of masses attended with my aunt and uncle) involved copious amounts of poor Regan’s vomit and a crucifix inserted where no crucifix should ever go. The impact of reading The Exorcist at nine probably explains a lot about the dysfunctional functioning of my psyche ever since, not least my tendency whenever an electrical gadget refuses to work properly to proclaim, a la Dr. Evil when his chair won’t stop spinning around, “I need an old priest and a young priest.”

Even with all of that going on, it wasn’t actually the A-side of the “Tubular Bells” single that set me off when Kevin played it for me — it was the flipside, which excerpted the closing portion of the album’s “first movement.” (By the way, wasn’t it entirely more satisfying to flip over a 45 and discover a cool song, as opposed to merely checking out the second track of a CD single or downloading an extra file?) “Tubular Bells (long version)” started out ominously enough, with a couple repetitions of the percolating guitar line that would underscore the entire track.

Soon enough, a formal, bordering-on-snooty British voice intones the words “grand piano,” and a melody is introduced atop that persistent guitar.

As the melody line concludes, the voice returns (innocuously enough) to say “reed and pipe organ,” and the melody repeats, and a pattern is established … a not-unpleasant pattern, really, though that guitar still offers cause for concern. Then the voice comes in again, this time a bit more disturbingly.

“Glockenspiel? What the hell’s a glockenspiel?” said the other voice, the one inside my prepubescent head. “Is that some sort of Nazi torture device?” Yet the pattern continues … relentlessly, and with growing momentum … the melody repeated by a bass guitar, a double-speed guitar, two slightly distorted guitars, and then …

Why did he have to say “mandolin” that way?!? As though it was the last instrument I’d hear before Hitler emerged from my closet? (Once my college girlfriend had heard this story, all she ever had to do to make fun of me was bug her eyes and say, “mahn-doh-LIN!”) The mandolin itself is spooky enough – high-pitched, quickly strummed, and with the other instruments building behind it. Building, building, through one more cycle featuring Spanish and acoustic guitars, and then finally comes the voice one more time, this time sounding like either Hitler or the devil himself: “plus, tubular … bells!”

As soon as that monstrous bell clanged for the first time, I was screaming, “Turn it off! Turn it off!” But Kevin wouldn’t turn it off, and I was forced to sit through the clanging … through the choir that may as well be angels of death … through that melody that I never wanted to hear again, and yet knew I’d be hearing in my head for the rest of my life.

Even as “Tubular Bells” inevitably became the soundtrack of my Hitler phase, the melody that sent me sprinting toward the light of the living room as surely as “Chariots of Fire” would later propel Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell, I became obsessed with listening to it again and again. Perhaps, I kidded myself, if I heard it enough times it would lose its ability to frighten me, and I could conquer my pathetic fear of a pop song.

It didn’t work, of course – and worse, Kevin and my brother Kit both knew it wasn’t working. Finally I banished the single from our house, telling Kevin I never wanted to hear it again and borrowing some other record of his that I can no longer remember – the Carpenters’ “Solitaire,” perhaps, or maybe “Fly Robin Fly.” This seemed to calm my nerves a bit, and soon I began to feel more confident in darkened hallways. But then, a couple of nights later, I was going to bed after a typical evening spent listening to my small collection of 45s, and my brother said, “You want me to play one more?”

“Sure,” I replied, and he set the needle down on a 45 – then walked to the door, cut off the overhead light and left, locking me inside … with “Tubular Bells” playing at full blast. That communist (which is what I called him when I was mad at him in those days) had borrowed the record back from Kevin, just so he could pull this awful stunt. I don’t know how many toys I stepped on, how many pieces of furniture I reduced to rubble, as I bolted from my bed and lunged for the door in complete darkness, screaming bloody murder while Kit held the doorknob on the outside so I couldn’t turn it. And when my dad arrived to bring down the hammer (which is pretty much what he was there for in those days), I could tell that even as he was figuring out a punishment for my brother he couldn’t hide the fact that he was … laughing at me.

Now I know why, of course. Now I know that the voice on the record isn’t Mephistopheles but rather Vivian Stanshall, former vocalist for the Bonzo Dog Band, and that his affect was supposed to be comical rather than nasty. (When Oldfield remade Tubular Bells a few years back in an effort to revive his sales numbers, he hired John Cleese to step in for the dearly departed Mr. Stanshall.) Now I know that the fascinating, haunting, but overly long Tubular Bells was pretty much the last stop for the hybrid classical/prog-rock instrumental genre before it morphed into New Age (and stopped frightening anybody). And now I know that the devil isn’t going to possess me via a pop song, no matter how menacing it is, and that Hitler isn’t going to leap out from behind every closed door.

Still, now I’m starting to think that maybe I shouldn’t have reminded myself of all this childhood trauma. And I’m thinking that you’ll have to forgive me if, over the next few days, I quicken my step a little bit when I traverse a darkened corridor.

Mike Oldfield – Tubular Bells, first movement

This weekend Entertainment Weekly came out with a vaguely interesting, vaguely infuriating list of the Fabs’ “50 best songs,” selected (it seems) by a panel of 10 EW writers (including that other, probably better-paid but infinitely less worthy Jeff Giles). The magazine’s crew did such a lousy job separating the Strawberry Fields from the Norwegian Wood that I figured, I can do better than that … heck, I’ll bet we all can!

And so here we are. Several of my Popdose colleagues have contributed their own lists, but this is no Popdose 100 – we weren’t organized enough this time to compile a comprehensive survey of our Beatle tastes. Still, there are a few generalizations to be reached, particularly on the popularity of such tracks as “A Day in the Life,” “Here Comes the Sun,” “Revolution,” and the Abbey Road medley. Please feel free – no, feel compelled – to offer your own best-of list in the comments, or at least to take potshots at ours. Me first, though (with each song’s EW ranking, if any, in parentheses):

1. A Day in the Life (#2 on the EW list). Here is the consummate track of the Beatles’ studio era, replete with John’s wisdom, Paul’s whimsy, George Martin’s knob-twirling prowess, a touch of self-reference, a great recording-session story, the seeds of “Paul is Dead” … and the Biggest Piano Chord in History.
2. Revolution (#21). Personally, I’ll take the “slow” version off The White Album, with its groovy backing vocals and John’s extra splash of ambivalence (“Don’t you know that you can count me out … in”). Fast or slow, John’s simultaneous encouragement and admonition to the counterculture, released (on the flip of “Hey Jude”) right in the middle of the riots at the ’68 Democratic Convention, could not have been better timed. Certain over-the-top protesters at our current moment could stand to heed its message.
3. Here, There and Everywhere (not on the EW list!). Forget about “Yesterday” or “And I Love Her” or even “Blackbird.” (Well, don’t forget them entirely…) This is the prettiest melody Paul ever wrote, and its lyric, while gimmicky, is exquisitely designed and brilliantly sung.
4. Here Comes the Sun (#48). The conventional wisdom has “Something” as George’s best Beatle song, maybe because it topped the chart and because Sinatra liked it. But I’ll take the pristine, acoustic “Here Comes the Sun” every time.
5. Ticket to Ride (#46). This single forcefully announced that, as far as the group was concerned, Beatlemania was over and it was time to Get Serious. It may be Ringo’s greatest recorded moment.
6. Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) (#9). John’s extramarital tomfoolery brilliantly distilled into 2:06 of hints, mystery and a dose of rudimentary sitar.
7. Rain (#28). A track full of psychedelic studio trickery, but a song that would have stood out in any Beatles era.
8. We Can Work It Out (#23). Half of the Greatest Two-Sided Single in History, along with…
9. Day Tripper (#41). All the evidence necessary that John was one of rock’s greatest singers.
10. I Am the Walrus (#32). Stomps all over “Come Together” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “Glass Onion” as the best of John’s Lewis-Carroll-on-LSD nonsense songs.
11. Things We Said Today (not on EW’s list!).
12. Across the Universe (#10).
13. Blackbird (#18).
14. Strawberry Fields Forever (#4).
15. A Hard Day’s Night (#1).
16. You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away (#17).
17. Back in the U.S.S.R. (N/A).
18. And Your Bird Can Sing (N/A).
19. Let It Be (#7).
20. I Will (N/A).
21. I’m So Tired (#49).
22. If I Fell (#22!).
23. Penny Lane (#12).
24. Tomorrow Never Knows (#8).
25. Please Please Me (N/A).
26. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (N/A!).
27. Paperback Writer (#26).
28. She Said She Said (#37.)
29. Help! (#13).
30. Helter Skelter (#47).
31. Two of Us (N/A).
32. Birthday (N/A).
33. She Loves You (#6).
34. In My Life (#15).
35. With a Little Help from My Friends (#40).
36. I Feel Fine (N/A).
37. Got To Get You Into My Life (N/A).
38. Don’t Let Me Down (N/A).
39. I Want to Tell You (N/A).
40. I’m Only Sleeping (#24).
41. Julia (N/A).
42. Something (#5).
43. I’ve Just Seen a Face (N/A).
44. Dr. Robert (N/A).
45. Hey Jude (#14).
46. I’ve Got a Feeling (#34).
47. Lady Madonna (N/A).
48. I Should Have Known Better (#33).
49. Getting Better (N/A).
50. Yesterday (#3). This song’s enduring reputation is based in large part on the 5 million covers that have been recorded to date — but I’d guess that half of them were done by Easy Listening acts looking to score some reflected street cred from the one “rock” song they could stand. It’s true that “Yesterday” made the Beatles acceptable, for the first time, to the boomers’ parents. But is that supposed to be a positive?

Among the EW-approved songs I left off my list, the most blasphemic exclusions probably are “Eleanor Rigby,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Nowhere Man,” and “Come Together.” Meanwhile, EW didn’t even get its list of the five least Fab tracks right, mucking it up with the throwaways “Wild Honey Pie” and “Dig It” and the instrumental “Flying.” C’mon, you Time Warner elitists — have some balls! I’m down with their inclusion of “All You Need is Love,” but (leaving off “Revolution 9,” which nobody ever sits through anyway) I’d add “Hello Goodbye,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Run for Your Life” and the single worst Beatles song of all time, “Mr. Moonlight.” (I know it’s a cover, but if it wastes 2½ minutes of my time on Beatles for Sale (which is easily the least of all Beatle albums, to begin with), it counts.

ROB SMITH
1. Two of Us. Lennon and McCartney had a marriage, for all intents and purposes, and this is one of the great relationship songs either of them came up with while the group was still together.
2. Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey. John was capable of making the most ridiculous word drool sound profound.
3. Yesterday. Of course, we’ve all heard it a million times. I’ve long wondered, though, what it must have been like to have been a teenage music lover in 1965, stumbling upon this song on the radio for the first time.
4. Abbey Road side-two medley. “Cheater!” some might say. OK, there are, what, 16 mini-songs here? You can’t really listen to one without hearing them all, and the breadth of material (not to mention the connective tissue that holds it all together) is truly mind-blowing.
5. Hey Jude. I’m a sucker for dynamics, and the soft-to-loud shift in this one gets me every time. My dad and I have a long-running debate about the extended outro—I think it’s genius; he just hears a bunch of hippies “na-na-na”-ing.
6. Got To Get You Into My Life. The horns are impeccable—they just blast you out of your seat. McCartney’s half-sung/half-screamed chorus is equally rattling.
7. The Long and Winding Road. According to my mom, this was playing in the hospital the day I was born. It was our mother/son dance at my wedding. I prefer the un-Spectorized version from Let It Be … Naked — it enables one to focus more on the words than the silly choir in the background of the original.
8. Here Comes the Sun. Has any album ever started its second side with a better song?
9. Real Love. The Anthology episodes aired in late November of 1995, the week I got married, so my association with this song (as well as “Free As a Bird”) is strong. Of the two “new” Beatles tracks unveiled that week, this one strikes me as being more Beatlesque.
10. She’s Leaving Home. The first Beatles song I ever really fell in love with, heard for the first time on the brown-covered Love Songs double album my parents bought in the ’70s.

DW. DUNPHY
1. While My Guitar Gently Weeps. It might as well have been George’s goodbye to the band — this song has power behind it. It’s the sound of someone who can leave home now. Oh, and it kinda rocks, too.
2. No Reply. Simple, direct, but the shift from verse to chorus is the prototype for the whole power-pop movement.
3. For No One. Elegant, baroque and utterly memorable.
4. A Day In The Life. The mini-epic, the widescreen equivalent of a pop song.
5. Oh! Darling. I remember my brother, an avowed Beatle basher, staring astonished at the tape deck: “That’s McCartney?!”
6. Let It Be. An absolute lifesaver when I was a young tyke in Parochial school. How that and Cat Stevens’ “Morning Has Broken” slipped through the noose of the advisory board, I’ll never know.
7. Something. There are few pure love songs. This is one of them.
8. You Won’t See Me. It’s got a great groove, does it not?
9. You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away. Lennon gets all Dylan on us, but the nice thing about the Beatles was how they absorbed their influences and came back with something worthy of comparison.
10. Revolution (single version). During this time, I assume it was necessary to remind that after the orchestra swelling, Hindu chasing, wife swapping, in-fighting and hippie dipping, the Beatles were a kick-ass little rock and roll band. With that opening riff and that howl, and Lennon’s
assertive voice thereafter, the message was clear: Yeah, we still do that, too.

JEFF GILES
1. Penny Lane. “Penny Lane” at #1? Well, yeah — today, anyway, because just a couple of mornings ago, I listened to the remastered version, and let me tell you, people…hearing the brass and woodwinds swell around the 2:20 mark is as close to a religious experience as I’ll probably ever come.
2. Two of Us. Rock’s original bromance falls apart, and the sound is typically, heartbreakingly lovely.
3. Here Comes the Sun. Is it possible to listen to this and not be pissed at John and Paul for pooh-poohing George’s songwriting all those years?
4. Hey Jude. A hackneyed choice, sure. But I’ll always have a soft spot for this song, because of the story I relayed here.
5. Blackbird. Civil rights anthem or just plain beautiful ballad? How about both? This is one I can listen to all day.
6. Oh! Darling. Half boozy English blues, half aggro rocker, this song doesn’t say much — but it says it with so much style. Plus, it’s a bitch to sing. Go on, try it.
7. The Long and Winding Road. Nobody writes a “B” section like McCartney, and this song’s is so painfully beautiful that listening to it is enough to make me forgive him for “Freedom.” I can take the “naked” version or the original, depending on my mood.
8. Across the Universe. I went through my “John the Genius” phase, but I’m such a sucker for melody — and John ended up being such a lazy jerk — that I’ve since come around to a more pro-Paul position, as reflected by my McCartney-heavy list. But I can’t argue with poetry like this. Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup / They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe…
9. All You Need Is Love. The ideals of a generation, summed up in a perfect throwaway pop song.
10. Lady Madonna. An irresistibly insistent piano melody, heavenly harmonies, brass, and handclaps — all in under 2:30. God bless ‘em.
11. We Can Work It Out. In the end, of course, they couldn’t work it out…but it’s hard to listen to the tender optimism of this song without being moved.
12. Good Day Sunshine. Nestled between Revolver‘s more experimental numbers, a lovely, cheery little pop stroll.
13. She Said She Said. I normally don’t have a lot of patience for the Beatles’ “sitar period,” but this is about the smoothest synthesis of pop and psychedelia you could ask for.
14. I’ll Follow the Sun. One of the only pre-Rubber Soul Beatles tracks that moves me. I tend to lump all their early stuff into the same dopey boat, but “I’ll Follow the Sun” reminds me that they were always more than that.
15. I Will. A perfectly simple, perfectly wonderful love song. Shorter than two minutes long, it took McCartney more than 65 takes to get it right, which should tell you everything you need to know about why the band’s songs are still so timeless.

BEN WISER
1. Abbey Road side-two medley
2. In My Life
3. Rain
4. Tomorrow Never Knows
5. A Day in the Life
6. Eleanor Rigby
7. I’m a Loser
8. If You’ve Got Trouble
9. Can’t Buy Me Love
10. Julia
11. A Hard Day’s Night
12. The Ballad of John and Yoko
13. Something
14. Dear Prudence
15. Things We Said Today
16. Love You To
17. And Your Bird Can Sing
18. I’m Only Sleeping
19. Yer Blues
20. Don’t Pass Me By
21. She’s Leaving Home
22. Cry Baby Cry
23. Fool on the Hill
24. I’ve Got a Feeling
25. It’s All Too Much
26. Love You To
27. Taxman
28. While My Guitar Gently Weeps
29. Let it Be
30. Kansas City

SCOTT MALCHUS
1. Ticket to Ride
2. Here Comes the Sun
3. I Saw Her Standing There
4. Two of Us
5. With a Little Help from My Friends
6. Norweigan Wood
7. She Loves You
8. The Word
9. Get Back
10. A Hard Day’s Night

KEN SHANE
1. Strawberry Fields Forever
2. A Day In the Life
3. Tomorrow Never Knows
4. Abbey Road side-two medley
5. I Me Mine
6. I Should Have Known Better
7. Things We Said Today
8. I Need You
9. No Reply
10. Ticket To Ride
11. If I Fell
12. Girl
13. For No One
14. Dear Prudence
15. Julia
16. Long, Long, Long
17. The Long and Winding Road
18. Paperback Writer
19. I’ll Be Back
20. Rain
21. Across the Universe
22. All You Need Is Love
23. Penny Lane
24. Hey Jude
25. Day Tripper

MIKE HEYLIGER
1. Two of Us
2. Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End
3. A Day in the Life
4. Here Comes the Sun
5. Don’t Let Me Down
6. Helter Skelter (an air-drums classic)
7. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
8. Yesterday
9. Birthday
10. Taxman
11. Eleanor Rigby
12. Got to Get You Into My Life
13. She Said She Said
14. Revolution (single version)
15. The Long and Winding Road
16. Get Back
17. You Won’t See Me
18. Can’t Buy Me Love
19. Hello Goodbye
20. Hey Bulldog

Among the more detailed histories, Michael Lang – one of the co-creators of Woodstock Ventures and a real force behind the festival – has penned The Road to Woodstock, which includes other organizers’ remembrances as well as his own. Then there’s Taking Woodstock, the book behind the film opening this weekend; its author, Elliot Tiber, has a somewhat more tenuous connection to the proceedings – he happened to have the authority to issue event permits in Bethel, NY, when Lang and his cohorts needed to find a new location for the festival at the 11th hour. Meanwhile, Woodstock Revisited makes no claims to officialdom – it’s simply 50 brief oral histories by 50 festival attendees.

Perhaps the most comprehensive, and the most absorbing, of all these is Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock by Pete Fornatale. The author is a long-serving New York DJ who happened to debut on WNEW-FM just three weeks before Woodstock, and spent the next several years chatting up festival organizers, artists and other participants. (Fornatale now hosts a show on the wonderful WFUV-FM.) The history he’s created weaves Woodstock’s tale moment by moment, artist by artist, achieving at many points a Rashomon-like tapestry of conflicting narratives and opposing attitudes (toward rabble-rousing yippie Abbie Hoffman, for example, who generally made a nuisance of himself before getting a guitar in the neck from an annoyed Pete Townsend).

Popdose spoke with Fornatale last week, as Woodstock-at-40 interest (on the bookshelves, at least) was nearing its peak.

Let me start out by playing devil’s advocate for a minute, because there’s unquestionably a strong current of boomer resentment among people who are my age and younger. Would you say this 40th anniversary might be the last big chance to remember Woodstock, because once the boomers get much older there won’t be that many people who still hold the legend in such regard?
You know, I’ve thought about this for a long time, both while doing the book and while I was doing the interviews that appear in it. And I honestly think that’s not the case. In 50 years – if there’s still a world in 50 years – people are still going to be interested in what happened during that weekend, how it happened, and why it mattered.

This 40th anniversary is getting so much attention for three reasons, as best I can tell. The first is curiosity: Young people who missed the festival by an accident of birth have become enamored of this music, these artists and that event. Fortunately, in our media-saturated world it’s possible to vicariously experience the event, and I believe that interest will continue even after the last living survivor of Woodstock is gone. The second is nostalgia: If a member of Woodstock Nation wants to spend a weekend engrossed in reliving that less responsible time in their lives, that’s a good thing. And the third is mortality: The age of the typical Woodstock attendee was between 15 to 30, and believe me, you look at life a lot differently in your 60s and 70s. If Woodstock, like it did for so many people of this generation, etched its message of peace, love and music in your soul, then you want to hang onto it as you head into the dustbin of eternity.

I’m struck by the collision of so many first-person accounts in your book, and the way it removes the consensus from the story of the event. Even the documentary, which has always seemed so exhaustive, clearly doesn’t tell the whole story.
I agree with that. I had a very similar response when we were compiling the book, and we found we had collected eight different stories as to how Max Yasgur came to be involved, and became this hero of the event. Woodstock has moved from reality to mythology, so it no longer matters how many nails were used to build the stage, or how much the artists were paid. It’s about the memories of the people who lived the experience, and who lived it vicariously. You know, there were the people who were at the festival itself, but then there’s a much larger cross-section of that generation who had the opportunity to become members of Woodstock Nation without having to sit in the mud, but with all the popcorn they could eat in the movie theater. Their stories matter now, too.

What’s your best guess as to how many people were actually at Woodstock? The crowd count that’s passed into legend is Joni Mitchell’s “half a million strong,” but by page 6 of your book I had already read at least a half-dozen estimates — from the police saying that Woodstock Ventures estimated it at 170,000 by Saturday afternoon, to the New York Times’ contemporaneous guess of 300,000, to festival production manager John Morris saying it was 600,000 or 700,000.
In my own head I accept the number of 450,000 at the actual event. Of course, there’s no way to estimate the number of people who were turned away or scared off by the traffic backups. I imagine that, one day, Google will figure out a way to take one of the existing pictures of the crowd on that hillside and count them off, head by head.

Tell me about the process of collecting these oral histories.
You know, everyone in the world passed through WNEW when I was there, which is why I got a head start collecting these remembrances of the Woodstock experiences. It was my son who came up with the idea of doing this book — he and I had collaborated on a Simon & Garfunkel history a couple years ago, and when we were done I asked, “So, what’s next?” And he said, “How about a history of Woodstock for the 40th anniversary?” And I said, “My God, I’ve got half of it done already.”

I had been collecting first-person accounts from that first year straight through. I’m a pack rat, so I had all these old tapes sitting around, but we soon discovered that reel-to-reel tapes from that era don’t play that well anymore — the adhesive falls off and the coated side separates, and you wind up with all sorts of distortion and peeling. I was panicked about that, but it turns out there’s a method of baking a reel-to-reel tape that reattaches the adhesive, and gives you a relatively short window of time to play the tapes and digitize the material.

Were there aspects of the story that you found yourself needing to fill in with contemporary interviews?
Absolutely! At places where we found holes in the story, we went out and found people who could fill in the gaps. For the Jimi Hendrix chapter I went to a friend, the singer Kenny Rankin, who was backstage while Jimi was playing. Jimi’s band for that day wasn’t the Experience or Band of Gypsies – it was an amalgam, and one of the musicians was a percussionist named Gerardo Velez who had grown up with Kenny. So Kenny got a backstage pass and got to jam with the master, so to speak. I knew the story and knew it would be perfect for the book, so we did the interview by phone late last year. Then, just a couple months ago on June 8, I was heading to an event in the city and checked this bulletin board at the station that I always look at for news — and there was a message that said, “Kenny Rankin, RIP.”

Did you find discrepancies, in fact or just in tone, between the stories you collected many years ago and the more contemporary remembrances?
The way I reference it in the book, in relation to the Max Yasgur stories, is, “You might want to hold your head together with both your hands so it doesn’t explode.” You have to sift your way through the evidence, and hope that the truth emerges. For example, the legend quickly grew about babies being born at Woodstock – even Walter Cronkite’s report [during a year-end CBS special in 1969] mentions it as a fact. But there’s no concrete evidence of a Woodstock baby, no records of a birth having happened during the festival. Don’t you think that baby would have its own reality show by now? So, anything we couldn’t verify, we didn’t put in, because I didn’t want to add to anything to the story unless I knew it was true.

We got some very candid stories [during the more recent interviews]. One of the most interesting came from John Sebastian. He wasn’t even supposed to perform at Woodstock – he went there as a spectator [but was pressed into service on the first day, with a borrowed guitar and, as he puts it, “a slight buzz”]. I interviewed him about his appearance, and he said he felt he had done himself a great disservice by allowing himself to be talked into performing when he was not going to be his best.

What are some of your other favorite stories? One of mine is Country Joe McDonald’s attempts to find some way to avoid going onstage by himself on Friday – before he electrified the crowd with his “Gimme an F!” cheer. And another is Melanie’s astonishment at the idea that she was going to have to play in front of the crowd she saw from the helicopter.
She was so nervous that she got a psychosomatic cough! Joan Baez wound up bringing her some tea. That’s quite a lovely story. Another great Joan story is that there was a smaller second stage at the festival, where lesser-known artists were performing. Joan, who was six months pregnant, made it over to that stage and then stood patiently in line behind the other acts who were waiting to perform. And she wound up doing a performance on that little stage, and finally her manager had to pull her back so she could do what she was supposed to be doing.

Also, I had never heard the electrocution story. They had put electrical wiring in the ground, underneath the area where the crowd was going to be, and as long as the ground was dry everybody thought it was far enough underground to not be a problem. But after all that rain turned the hillside into a giant mud pit, somebody said, “If we don’t do something to move this wire, this is going to be the biggest mass-electrocution in history.”

That makes me think about the other logistical problems – particularly the traffic issues. In the book, several of the festival organizers claim they had an airtight plan for the traffic coming toward the festival site, and blamed the mess on the fact that the New York cops they had hired to direct it were pulled back. It’s hard for me to believe they had such a great plan, considering the way things turned out.
I think all of that had to do with the fact that nobody knew how big the festival was going to be until that Friday, when so many people had already shown up. They were so overwhelmed by it all, so in over their heads, that anything they had thought was going to happen had to be thrown to the wind. In the end, the whole weekend was based on improvisation. You know, when they got thrown out of the original site and had to go to Bethel at the last minute, they had to make decisions like whether to make sure the stage got completely built or whether to build strong fences and a box office. They chose to focus on the stage, and the effect of that was that it became a free concert.

All the parties involved were overwhelmed by the massiveness of it, which makes it even more amazing that it didn’t turn into a bloodbath or a disaster of some sort.

I have to say that I’ve always questioned the legend that grew up around the audience at Woodstock, and their ability to coexist in those numbers and under those conditions. On the one hand, I’m sure there was a general amazement at what was going on, and a desire to get through the rain and mud and lack of food and water with a sense of togetherness. But then I think, most of that crowd must have been from the New York City area – and I’ve lived there, and I know how New Yorkers deal with the little inconveniences, and I can’t imagine there could have been all that much peace and love.
Well, maybe the drugs had something to do with it. (laughs) It was the same for the Summer of Love and for Woodstock – the conditions were terrible much of the time, but people came away with memories of an incredibly positive experience. I’ve tried over the years to explain this to myself, and to explain it to others. But I think the best explanation I have come across is [philosopher] Joseph Campbell’s idea, which I quote in the book, that people aren’t so much looking for the meaning of life, but are looking to “feel the rapture of being alive.” And I think that’s what Woodstock gave them.

You know, when Woodstock came along it created — the term wasn’t fashionable at the time, but it really was a “perfect storm.” It was the culmination of the climate of the ’60s, the response of young people to the war, and all the rest of it. It was also the emergence of this grown-up kind of rock ‘n’ roll — not ’50s rock, but a post-Beatles leap in the seriousness of rock ‘n’ roll. And this was a group of people, the boomers, who knew they were different from the generations that came before them, but they didn’t recognize how many of them there were, or how like-minded they were. Woodstock turned out to be a coming-out party for a generation.

That’s a common theme – but when you look at the timeline of it all, wasn’t Woodstock closer to the end than the beginning? I mean, Altamont was only a few months later, and that really took a lot of air out of the balloon. And within a year of Woodstock Jimi and Janis were dead, Kent State had happened, and already the boomers were starting to look at the world a lot differently.
There’s no question about that. The book doesn’t shrink from the dark side of it all — the drugs were obviously already becoming a problem for people like [folksinger] Tim Hardin, who was in terrible shape when he performed at the festival.

One of the paradoxes about Woodstock was that the seeds of its own destruction were planted during the festival. Within a few weeks there were “Woodstock laws” in place that forbade gatherings of that size unless there was adequate access to water, food and sanitary facilities. And a lot of lessons were learned from Woodstock, both the festival and the film that followed it – lessons about how to make sure events like it in the future would be money-making ventures. So we’ve watched as all sorts of mechanisms, from overpriced concessions to T-shirt and souvenir sales, have been put in place to make sure these festivals turn a profit. And if you look at all the festivals that came along after Woodstock – including, certainly, the 1994 and 1999 Woodstock sequel festivals – they don’t come close to the same spirit that was created that weekend.

For that reason, it’s easy to get caught up in the legend. It’s a good legend. One of my favorite quotes about Woodstock came from Roger Ebert, of all people, who reviewed the documentary when he was a young critic. Let me quote him directly: “Years from now, when our generation is attacked for being just as uptight as all the rest of the generations, it will be good to have this movie around to show that, just for a weekend anyway, that wasn’t altogether the case.”

To put it simply, the Billboard Hot 100 charts of that decade were messed up. (I put it somewhat less than simply in a long-winded column last year.) The pop radio format split in two, resulting in charts that rarely reflected anybody’s actual listening experience. Major labels stopped manufacturing singles for many artists (mostly white ones) in an effort to sell more albums, which resulted in huge radio hits that never qualified for the Hot 100. The advent of precise technology for measuring retail sales and radio airplay resulted in singles topping the charts and staying … and staying … and staying. And as I discussed last week, superstars like Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston and Boyz II Men were so desperate to top the charts, and keep up with the competition, that they conspired with their labels to withhold the retail releases of their new singles until the songs peaked at radio, then flooded the marketplace with discounted product to ensure #1 chart debuts.

As a result of these and other, more random developments, the #2 singles of the ’90s were a fascinating bunch. There were huge hits that were simply blocked by huger ones, and great songs that stalled behind ones whose popularity now leaves us scratching our heads. There were oldies that re-emerged after decades, and the two longest-running chart hits of all time (for the moment). So away we go – and, as always, at the end of the column I’ll list some additional singles that were stranded at third base so we can argue which ones most deserved to score.

11. (tie) “Right Here, Right Now,” Jesus Jones; “P.A.S.S.I.O.N.,” Rhythm Syndicate; “Every Heartbeat,” Amy Grant; “It Ain’t Over Til It’s Over,” Lenny Kravitz; and “Fading Like a Flower (Every Time You Leave),” Roxette. What do these wildly disparate singles have in common? They all were blocked from the top spot during the summer of ’91 by the same song, Bryan Adams’ treacly Robin Hood anthem “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You.” (It was the first of three Adams soundtrack singles – all of them god-awful, in my opinion – to top the charts during the ’90s.) Adams spent seven weeks at #1 while holding off five different competitors – the highest number of second-place finishers thwarted by the same single since Percy Faith’s “Theme from A Summer Place” was #1 in 1960. The only one of the five to earn a second week at #2 was – surprise – “P.A.S.S.I.O.N.” In honor of that fact – and because its video is the only one of the five to feature fire (fire! fire!), scantily clad dancers and an atrocious white-boy rap — I’m happy to showcase it here.

10. “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Queen. What on earth is this doing here? Well, they know all about it in Aurora, Illinois.

That scene from Wayne’s World – combined with strong recurrent play following Freddie Mercury’s death in November ’91 – sent “Bohemian Rhapsody” rocketing back up the charts the following spring. It zipped past its initial chart peak (#9 in the spring of 1976) and eventually achieved the highest placement for a re-release of a true “oldie” (i.e., a song more than a decade old) in Hot 100 history. Nowadays, thanks to a revision of Billboard’s chart rules, such a feat isn’t even possible; if it were, then early last month the entire Top 10 might have consisted of Michael Jackson songs.

9. (tie) “Lovefool,” the Cardigans; “I Believe I Can Fly,” R. Kelly; “Don’t Let Go (Love),” En Vogue; “One Headlight,” the Wallflowers. Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak My Heart” didn’t achieve quite the same feat (for the purposes of this list) that Bryan Adams had, but it did fend off these four challengers during its 11-week reign in the winter of ’96-’97. And all four were pretty great; any one of them could have earned a place on this list on its own. Here’s the thing, though – only two of them actually reached #2 on the Hot 100. The other two, “Lovefool” and “One Headlight,” were never released as singles; each ascended to the #2 position on the Hot 100 Airplay chart (the former for eight weeks, the latter for five) but never qualified for inclusion on the big chart because Billboard’s rules at the time didn’t allow it. And here’s the other thing: The biggest hit of the winter of 1997 wasn’t really “Unbreak My Heart,” whose 11 weeks atop the Hot 100 were built on only two weeks atop the airplay chart, and one atop the sales chart. No, the most-heard song of the season was No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak,” which spent 16 weeks atop the airplay chart and became the second-biggest radio hit of all time. But “Don’t Speak” never appeared on the Hot 100, either, because a physical single was never released. (See my aforementioned column from last year for details of another, even bigger hit that suffered a similar fate.) If all this is so confusing that you’ve skipped to the bottom of the paragraph … well, that’s how screwed up the Billboard charts became during the ’90s.

8. “All I Wanna Do,” Sheryl Crow. Back in the days when we still published a “Chartburn” column around these parts, that panel of “experts” had a knock-down-drag-out over the merits of “All I Wanna Do.” I’m still a fan of it, I must say – its lyric, a poem by Wyn Cooper that Crow found in a used-book shop, is still a breath of fresh air after all these years. It went on to win the Record of the Year Grammy and launch Crow’s superstar career – even though the second-biggest Hot 100 hit of all time, Boyz II Men’s blecchy “I’ll Make Love to You” (14 weeks at #1), kept the sun from ever coming up over Santa Monica Boulevard during the fall of ’94. Sheryl and Eric — take us to the bridge!

7. “Tears in Heaven,” Eric Clapton. I’m not going to repeat the oft-told tale of 4-year-old Conor Clapton’s death, and the massive outpouring of sympathy that drove daddy Eric’s single up the charts during the spring of ’92 — and then, the following winter, steered Clapton onstage for approximately 87 Grammy-award acceptance speeches. By which point, after we’d all watched Clapton push his glasses up his nose a million times while he played “Tears in Heaven” and “Layla” on MTV Unplugged, we were all ready for Slowhand to pick up his electric guitar again. “Tears in Heaven” is still a great, heartbreaking song, of course. By the way, it was blocked from the top by Vanessa Williams’ “Save the Best for Last.” She has her own tales of heartbreak to tell, I’m sure. I’d like to hear them — the more detail the better, please.

6. “My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It),” En Vogue. It was during my treatise on the #2s of the ’70s that I lamented the inability of a mature, brilliantly performed soul classic (“You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine”) to surpass a substance-free turd like “Shake Your Booty” on the pop charts. Well, here we have a stone-cold brilliant single from the finest girl group of the ’90s (suck it, TLC and SWV and all other three-lettered wannabes) … and, wouldn’t you know, it was stomped by Kris Kross’s utterly inane “Jump” during the spring of 1992. Well, it’s nice to know that En Vogue got the last laugh – when was the last time you heard “Jump,” anyway? – because “My Lovin’” really had it goin’ on: fab vocals (of course), a happenin’ guitar riff lifted from James Brown’s “The Payback,” and a hot-hot-smokin’-hot video. Some people think the group’s follow-up clip, for “Giving Him Something He Can Feel,” is even hotter … but as far as I’m concerned the latter clip gives entirely too much camera time to the gawking dudes, rather than letting the rest of us gawk ourselves.

5. “You Were Meant for Me,” Jewel. Ms. Kilcher earns her lofty position on this list not because her song, released in November 1996, is a pop classic – in fact, every time I hear it I can’t believe it wasn’t laughed off the radio, with lyrics like “I got my eggs and my pancakes too / I got my maple syrup, everything but you.” No, Jewel is here because, by the time “You Were Meant for Me” finally dropped off the Hot 100 in April 1998, it ranked as the longest-running single in the chart’s history at 65 weeks. It was helped along by its B-side, “Foolish Games,” which became a Top 10 hit on its own and kept the single’s sales figures aloft for six additional months. To get an idea how bifurcated pop radio had become by the late ’90s, consider that “You Were Meant for Me” stalled at #2 behind Puff Daddy’s “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down,” and later moved back to that position for an additional week behind Notorious B.I.G.’s posthumous “Hypnotize.” How many radio stations do you think were playing all three of those songs at the time?

4. “How Do I Live,” LeAnn Rimes. By the time Jewel finished her 15-month run on the Hot 100, the single that would break her longevity record was already on its own downward trajectory. Teen country chanteuse LeAnn Rimes, who at the time was hyped as the second coming of Patsy Cline, was commissioned to record Diane Warren’s sad-but-syrupy confection “How Do I Live” for producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s film Con Air. But once it was finished Bruckheimer rejected Rimes’ version as too immature and poppy, and not at all Cline-ish. He gave the job to Trisha Yearwood instead, and she turned in a far more nuanced rendition that would earn her a #1 country hit and a slew of awards. Rimes, however, was not to be denied, and so Curb Records released her version in direct competition with Yearwood’s – an occurrence that was common until the ’50s (five versions of “Melody of Love” charted simultaneously in 1955), but rarely seen since. Yearwood won the battle on the country charts, but Rimes swamped her on the Hot 100, spending four weeks at number two and dominating “mainstream” pop radio for nearly six months. Her failure to ascend to #1 can be laid, along with a bazillion bouquets of flowers, on the gravesite of Princess Diana; her death inspired Elton John to release the biggest-selling single in history, “Candle in the Wind 1997,” and that single’s performance at retail made Rimes’ chart-topping mission impossible. Still, “How Do I Live” remained on the Hot 100 for 69 weeks, smashing Jewel’s record by a full month. It finally dropped off the chart in October ’98, almost exactly 10 years before Jason Mraz’ single “I’m Yours” peaked at #6. The significance of that fact is that “I’m Yours” remains on the Hot 100 right now at #35, in its 68th week. If it lasts two more – and there’s no reason to doubt it will – it will render “How Do I Live” a historical footnote, chartwise. (Perhaps its chart run eventually will last as long as the live video below.) Oh, well, LeAnn – at least you’ve still got Eddie Cibrian (if US magazine is to be believed).

3. “Whoomp! There It Is,” Tag Team. Depending on where you lived and which subset of Top 40 radio you listened to, this was the song of the summer of 1993 … or, at least, its title was the phrase you couldn’t get out of your head. The story of “Whoomp!” is perhaps unparalleled in pop history. During the spring of 1993, two songs emerged from the deep South that were different in nearly every way, except for their shared chorus. The first one to chart, by the Miami-based crew 95 South, was titled “Whoot, There It Is” and eventually climbed to #11 on the Hot 100. A month after that song’s chart debut, along came the Atlanta-based Tag Team with “Whoomp! There It Is,” and “Whoomp!” really took off. It sold more than 4 million copies and topped Billboard’s singles sales chart for a whopping 16 weeks. Its failure to reach #1 on the Hot 100 is, again, indicative of the split at Top 40 radio by that time; “Whoomp!” never climbed higher than #9 on the airplay chart because many “Top 40 Mainstream” stations weren’t spinning it at all. As it was, “Whoomp!” cooled its heels for seven weeks at #2 on the big chart, stuck behind UB40’s abysmal reggaefication of Elvis’ “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” These days – apart from their continued prominence at sports arenas nationwide — both “Whoomp!” and “Whoot” are perhaps best remembered by pop linguists tracking the origins of the enduring catchphrase “Woot!” If you must, you can explore the bickering over the etymology of “Woot!” here.

2. “Missing,” Everything But the Girl. Who’da thunk, during all those years when Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt were playing navel-gazing ballads and smooth bossa nova without really denting the American consciousness, that all they needed to scale the heights of pop radio was one good dance mix? (Or, seemingly, twenty of them.) “Missing” started as a nice, midtempo track off the duo’s eighth studio album, Amplified Heart, during the fall of 1994. (Thorn later admitted that they had intended “Missing” to be a dance track in the first place, but wimped out and removed the house-music elements they’d recorded.) It wasn’t until nearly a year after the album’s release that Todd Terry’s remix broke out of dance clubs and onto pop radio – and it was seven months after that before “Missing” climbed to #2, where it was vanquished by the biggest hit in Hot 100 history. (That would be Mariah Carey & Boyz II Men’s “One Sweet Day,” which I honored last summer in this space with the title “Worst #1 Song of the ’90s.”) I never thought I’d see Tracey and a bevy of go-go dancers on the same stage, but I guess there’s a first time for everything.

Apologies to my colleague Jason Hare, and to fans everywhere of Popdose patron saint Michael McDonald, for my failure to include Warren G. and Nate Dogg’s “Regulate” on this list. I know I’m supposed to pay McD his props whenever possible, but what can I say? I keep forgettin’. Anyway, here are some of the decade’s other #2 hits, along with the songs that kept them from climbing One Step Closer to immortality. (sorry)

“Pump Up the Jam,” Technotronic (Michael Bolton’s “How Am I Supposed to Live Without You”); “Cradle of Love,” Billy Idol, and “Power,” Snap! (Mariah Carey’s “Vision of Love”); “I Wanna Sex You Up,” Color Me Badd (Extreme’s “More than Words”); “I Love Your Smile,” Shanice (Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy”); “Under the Bridge,” Red Hot Chili Peppers (Kris Kross’s “Jump”); “If I Ever Fall in Love,” Shai, and “Rumpshaker,” Wreckx n Effect (Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You”); “Nothin’ But a G Thang,” Dr. Dre (Snow’s “Informer”); “All That She Wants,” Ace of Base (Meat Loaf’s “I Would Do Anything for Love”).

Also, “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” Nicki French (Bryan Adams’ “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman”); “Not Gon’ Cry,” Mary J. Blige, and “Sittin’ Up in My Room,” Brandy (Carey & Boyz II Men’s “One Sweet Day”); “Nobody Knows,” Tony Rich Project (Celine Dion’s “Because You Loved Me”); “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now,” Ms. Dion, and “I Love You Always Forever,” Donna Lewis (Los Del Rio’s “Macarena”); “Bitch,” Meredith Brooks (Puff Daddy & Faith Evans’s “I’ll Be Missing You”); “Walking on the Sun,” Smash Mouth (Notorious B.I.G.’s “Mo Money Mo Problems”); “Frozen,” Madonna (K-Ci & JoJo’s “All My Life”); “You’re Still the One,” Shania Twain (Next’s “Too Close”); “Kiss Me,” Sixpence None the Richer (TLC’s “No Scrubs”); “Last Kiss,” Pearl Jam (Jennifer Lopez’s “If You Had My Love”); and “Back at One,” Brian McKnight (Santana’s “Smooth”).

I’ll be back soon to wrap up this series with a look at the Aughts – and to question how in the world classics like “Since U Been Gone,” “Crazy,” and … um … “Fergalicious” failed to reach the top.